How to Create a WordPress Multi Step Form: A Beginner’s Guide

Anyone who has ever had to fill up a form can tell you that it can get boring if it gets too long. In this day and age, time has become a precious commodity. If you want your users to spend their time on your forms, then you’re going to have to get clever. One way of doing so is by using a WordPress multi step form that divide the form into multiple parts. For that purpose, WPEverest brings you the Multi-Part Forms add-on for its popular form builder plugin, Everest Forms. Unlike the normal forms, multi step forms provides your users with small chunks of the form at a time.

Why use a WordPress Multi Step Form?

The most important reason for using a multi step form is basically to improve user participation in your forms. People will often pass on filling up a form if it looks time-consuming. Dividing a single long form into multiple parts can make it much less intimidating. In fact, research has found that people were 14% more likely to finish a multi step form compared to a single-part one, despite the number of items being actually the same. Shorter pages are just easier to digest than a single, long one. As a result, people are going to be more likely to finish filling out your form.

Furthermore, using multi step forms can make the act of filling the form much more engaging. Not only does it provide the users with control over the content that appears, but multi-part forms can also make the presentation feel more lively.

How to Create Multi Step Forms with Everest Forms?

1. Install and Activate the Necessary Plugins

First of all, you are going to have to make sure that Everest Forms and Everest Forms Pro is installed on your WordPress site. You can take purchase the appropriate plans from here to gain access to the Multi-Part Form addon. Once you’ve done that, download the file for the add-on from your WPEverest account page and install it as well. Now, you can move on and create multi step forms.

2. Add New Parts to your Forms

Now that you have the add-on installed and activated, the forms created using Everest Forms will support multiple parts. You can create either create a new multi step form or add additional parts to any of your existing forms. From your Admin Sidebar, click on Everest Forms to find the list of existing forms. To create a new one, navigate to Everest Forms>>Add New from the sidebar.

Once you have a form open, you can add new parts to it. All you need to do is click on the Add New Part button at the bottom right. It’s really that simple.

3. Customize Everything to your Liking

The different parts of your form will appear as tabs towards the bottom. You even drag them around the freely reorder them.

If you click on one, you will be able to change its options. The Part Title option will, like the name suggests, allow you the set the name for the part. Meanwhile, the Next Label and Previous Label options allow you to set what to call the buttons to navigate between the various parts of the form.

If you want to remove a part, it can be done from here as well. Just click on the Delete Part button below the Multi-Part options and select OK when asked for confirmation.

If you go to the settings, you can also find some options to customize how your WordPress multi step form works. Just go to the settings tab at the top and then click on ‘Multi-Part’. From here, you can find the option to enable or disable WordPress multi page forms entirely. Below that, you can find the drop-down list that allows you to select the way the form shows your progress. You can also change the color of that indicator. Similarly, the Part Navigation Alignment option allows you to choose where the navigation buttons appear.

4. Check if Everything Looks Fine

Before you publish the post, don’t forget to check how the form would appear to your users. To do that, just go to Everest Forms>>All Forms and hover your mouse over your form. Click on Preview and it will open a page showing the frontend view of the form.

And that’s all there is to it. Just copy the shortcode from the top-right and paste it to the post/page you want and you’re good to go.

As you can see, it is extremely easy to create an effective WordPress multi step form this way. With the Everest Forms Multi Part Forms addon, even your longest forms will appear much easier to fill out for your visitors.